


as I am

by Jothowrote



Series: Cambridge AU [1]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Magical Realism, University AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2019-12-30 01:29:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18305411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jothowrote/pseuds/Jothowrote
Summary: Hamid’s life falls apart and he puts it back together again, slowly, with the help of some old and new friends.A human magical realism AU with Hamid at Cambridge Uni with the OG LOLOMG.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [midnightmew](https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightmew/gifts).



> I'm so sorry for this, MidnightMew. I don't know if this is what you really asked for, but it's what happened. I hope it's somewhat readable and enjoyable!
> 
> I really wanted to get Azu and Grizzop in this somehow, but it just didn't quite happen. Maybe in the future I'll come back and write some more in this odd verse.
> 
> Edit: I did! Chapter 2 now has Azu and Grizzop.

Ever since he’d returned from his year abroad at the University of Prague, Hamid’s life had taken a spectacular swan dive into the toilet.

He’d arrived back in Cambridge to an empty flat, a note left on the coffee table, and a warning letter from the university.

 

Over a week into his complete and utter withdrawal from the outside world, and his doorbell rang. Hamid dragged himself out of bed, taking the duvet with him, and staggered down the hall to his front door.

‘Ah, Hamid!’ Bertie boomed, taking up the entire doorframe with his huge build, resplendent in his Cambridge Blues. ‘I heard you were back in the home country!’

It was testament to just how terrible Hamid looked – wrapped in his duvet, hair a mess, still in his pyjamas at five in the evening – that Bertie immediately stopped talking.

‘Hello, Bertie,’ Hamid sighed despondently.

‘Hamid,’ Bertie said, frowning slightly, leaning down until they were at eye-level, ‘are you feeling… alright?’

‘No,’ Hamid sighed again.

‘You look…’

‘I know.’ Hamid released a corner of duvet to rub some dried drool from the corner of his mouth. 

‘When was the last time you showered?’

Hamid cast his mind back.

‘A week?’ he hazarded. ‘Maybe longer?’

Bertie blanched.

‘It’s worse than I thought,’ he said, apparently to himself.

A heavy hand, with fingers not unlike Cumberland sausages, landed on Hamid’s shoulder.

‘Come now, Hamid,’ Bertie said, in what sounded like his ‘comforting’ voice. It still boomed like a foghorn, but it was slightly less brash than usual. ‘You go and have a shower, and then we’ll go out to your favourite restaurant.’

Hamid, both too tired and too apathetic to fight against Bertie’s grip, let himself be pushed into the bathroom.

Half an hour later, his hair still a little damp, Hamid discovered Bertie rooting through his kitchen cupboards.

‘It’s a good thing we’re going out,’ Bertie said, not at all ashamed at being caught snooping, ‘you’re as bad as old Mother Hubbard! Come on,’ he said, throwing a huge arm around Hamid’s small frame, ‘you can treat me to dinner.’

Alexandrie was, as usual, a delight. The waiters ushered Hamid to his favourite table – the one tucked into the corner, out of sight of the main door, that still afforded a good view of the rest of the restaurant’s tables. 

Hamid wondered if he was too heartbroken to eat. When the first courses began to arrive, he discovered he wasn’t.

‘What happened, Hamid?’ Bertie asked, once they’d made their way through a bottle of house red and half the appetizer menu. ‘I thought you only got back to Cambridge last week!’

‘I did,’ Hamid said morosely, cleaning his plate of sauce with warm, fresh bread. ‘She left me, Bertie.’

‘Who?’ Bertie asked, burping his satisfaction as the waiters swooped in to clear the empty plates.

‘Liliana,’ Hamid whined. ‘I was going to _propose_ when I got back – I was so excited – but she’d already moved out.’

‘Moved out, you say?’ Bertie said. ‘Say, Hamid, I don’t suppose you have room for a little one in that lovely great flat of yours, only the uni are kicking up a bit of a stink at me still living in dorms. At a reduced rate, for an old friend, of course?’

‘Those dorms are supposed to be for first years, Bertie,’ Hamid pointed out.

‘Well, they should have put that on the accommodation information,’ Bertie said.

‘They did,’ Hamid said.

He thought a little bit, as the main course arrived. The flat did feel big and empty, now devoid of all Liliana’s possessions. Maybe having a friend around – even one as fair-weather as Bertie – would help him feel better.

‘Ok, Bertie,’ Hamid said. ‘Why not?’

 

To his great surprise, Hamid didn’t regret his snap decision in allowing Bertie to move in. His flat had felt too empty with just one person rattling around it, and when it wasn’t feeling empty it felt full of the ghost of his old relationship.

Bertie arrived one morning with endless bags, his designer suits hung up on a rack and carried up the stairs by some very long-suffering removal men as Bertie bellowed instructions at them. Bertie had his flaws, but one thing he did very well was take up space, and that was precisely what Hamid needed.

They’d gotten drunk on fine wine that evening, Hamid’s large flatscreen playing endless episodes of some shitty sitcom in the background, and had eaten expensive caviar and cheese on crackers at two in the morning. Hamid had woken the next day with his mouth stained purple and a killer wine headache. He felt better than he had since he’d first come back to Cambridge.

It was… fun, living with Bertie. Hamid had never lived with friends before – he’d gone straight from student halls to moving in with Liliana, his parents buying him the flat as a reward for getting onto the year abroad programme. Then he’d spent a year in Prague, staying in the halls at the university there. And when he came back to Cambridge, his flat had been empty.

Living with Liliana had felt very grown-up. They’d hosted wine and cheese evenings for their coupled-up friends, had game nights, watched tv together, gone to bed at sensible times, done their coursework together at the large, oak dining table. In Prague, Hamid had enjoyed going back to student life for a while, though of course he missed his girlfriend immensely. They’d promised to facetime at least once a week, when they’d parted at the airport. Hamid kept up with the calls, but as the year went on, the calls petered from weekly to fortnightly to barely monthly. Looking back, Hamid realised that had been the beginning of the end, but in Prague he reasoned it away – they were both very busy, with demanding courses. The time apart would only make their reunion sweeter.

But he’d returned to a cold, empty flat, with an emotionless note.

When Bertie moved in, Hamid couldn’t mope all day any more. Bertie was loud, larger than life – a quality most people found off-putting. Hamid, who had been Bertie’s chosen best friend throughout their time at Eton, enjoyed it as one of Bertie’s better characteristics. Bertie straight-out refused to let Hamid hermit himself in his bedroom, marinating in his misery – instead, he was dragged out to colourful bars to drink expensive champagne cocktails, dragged to shows and plays, and generally used as an accessory for living the high life.

Hamid paid for everything, of course. Bertie made a good show of his wealth and position, but Hamid knew the truth - the McGuffingham family was destitute, and Bertie had only been able to go to both Eton and Cambridge because of his family’s long ties with the institutions.

Hamid had more money than he knew what to do with, a credit card from his family’s bank that was essentially limitless, and no rent or bills to pay on the flat his parents gave him. He was perfectly happy to fund Bertie’s lavish lifestyle, as long as it kept him distracted from his own troubles.

But the partying had to end sometime.

On the Monday that term started, Hamid woke up with a hangover and a feeling of dread deep in the pit of his stomach. He’d planned for a month of getting settled back in Cambridge before having to go back to lectures and had timed his flight back accordingly. But then he’d lost over a week after retreating into his bedroom, and then almost three to Bertie’s whirlwind arrival into his flat, accompanied by his lavish lifestyle.

The university letter he’d opened on his first day back home, just after reading Liliana’s note, had since lain untouched on his desk. It seemed to exude a faint aura of menace. He ignored it and dragged himself out of bed.

 

Hamid knew it was going to be a bad day from the first moment he stepped outside his bedroom and was greeted by the sight of Oscar Wilde lounging on his sofa. To make it worse, Wilde was dressed in Bertie’s paisley dressing gown with tassels – and nothing else. 

‘Oh hello, Hamid,’ Oscar Wilde said, smirking.

Hamid just stared and blinked.

‘You might want to hurry up,’ Wilde continued, ‘your meeting with the Head of faculty is in forty minutes.’

‘How… how did you know about that?’

‘I’m your personal tutor, Hamid,’ Wilde said, his smirk widening, completely unrepentant. He shifted slightly and the dressing gown threatened to slip of one shoulder – Hamid looked determinedly at Wilde’s face and nowhere else. ‘It’s my job to know these things.’

Hamid felt like pointing out that sleeping with their tutee’s roommates didn’t exactly fall under the purview of a personal tutor, but it was too early in the morning to get into wordplay with Oscar Wilde. Instead, Hamid turned on his heel and went back into his bedroom. Given a choice between eating his breakfast and another half an hour’s doze, he chose the sleep.

This, of course, meant he overslept and turned up to his meeting a quarter of an hour late, sweaty, red-faced, and panting. It took him another ten minutes to wash his face and tidy his hair in the loos before he felt presentable enough to actually go to his meeting.

The Head of Faculty spent the first few seconds just frowning across her desk.

Hamid squirmed.

‘We’re willing to give you a chance,’ she said, lacing her hands together. ‘Despite your… poor results, your lecturers in Prague seem to think you have a natural talent. One that shouldn’t be wasted.’

Hamid just swallowed and tried to look appropriately studious.

‘So,’ she sighed, ‘on the advice of Professor Einstein, we’re discounting your marks from your year at the University of Prague – the public reason being that their assessments do not mesh well with ours. In reality, of course, it is because you failed the year there. Spectacularly.’

Hamid winced.

‘But, Hamid – this is not a clean slate. Your marks from your first and second year here still count towards your final degree mark, and they are not as high as we would hope. You’ll need to work hard this year.’

Hamid could barely believe what he was hearing.

‘You’re giving me another chance?’ he squeaked.

‘Don’t let us regret it,’ she said.

Hamid walked away from the Department building feeling vague and hazy. He’d walked into that office already trying to think of ways to tell his parents that he was going to get kicked out of uni, and now he had a whole new chance to put his year in Prague – an excellent partying year, but not so much a year where he had excelled in his studies – far behind him.

He was still somewhat in a daze when he arrived home, and so he walked bodily into someone in the hall.

‘Watch where you’re going,’ growled a thick, west country accent, as the man pushed past Hamid with a huff. Hamid only managed to work out that the stranger was just a little taller than he was – unusual, since Hamid was often the smallest by far in any group – and much broader, before the front door had swung shut behind him and left Hamid alone in the hallway.

‘Has someone finally moved into the top floor?’ Hamid asked as he walked into his flat on the first floor, hanging up his coat with care.

Bertie, lounging on the sofa in his underwear, glanced up.

‘Hmm?’ he said through mouthful of cereal.

‘There was a new guy in the hall downstairs,’ Hamid said. ‘The top floor’s been empty for a while.’

Bertie shrugged. Milk slopped onto the sofa, and Hamid tried not to cringe.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t paying attention this morning.’

‘When did Wilde leave?’

Oh, not long after you,’ Bertie said, in a very blasé fashion that Hamid didn’t think he deserved.

‘Bertie,’ Hamid said, admonishment creeping into his tone. ‘You know Wilde is a faculty member.’

‘He’s not my teacher,’ Bertie huffed. ‘He’s not even in my department. History and English don’t even talk to each other.’

‘But still,’ Hamid tried, ‘I thought you were all over that rugby player? You know? The dumb, blond one?’

‘Edward? Oh, yes, not to worry,’ Bertie blustered. ‘He’ll give in to my charm one of these days. In fact,’ and Bertie’s face took on a slyness that gave Hamid the heebie jeebies, ‘it’s sports social night at the union. You fancy a night out, don’t you, Hamid?’

‘It’s the first day of term!’ Hamid protested. ‘I need to get a head start on work!’

 

Twelve hours later and Hamid was in a stuffy club, clutching a sweating plastic cup with indeterminate alcohol sloshing around inside, desperately trying not to be stood on by all the huge rugby players as they charged about the dance floor.

Bertie had, once again, struck out with the elusive Edward, and so had moved his sights onto more susceptible prey. Hamid kept a wary eye on him from the bar, and drank in cramped solitude.

Then a huge student in sports gear turned towards him and threw up on Hamid’s trousers.

Hamid had had enough. In the tiny, disgusting club bathroom he cleaned off the worst of it, holding in his own threatening nausea, and then he fought to get outside for some fresh air. The smoking area was packed, so he left the club environs entirely and wandered around the back to an empty alley. There he rested against a cold, slightly damp brick wall, and tried to hold back tears.

He stayed there for a while, taking shaky breaths, swallowing down his sobs. He wondered whether Bertie had even seen him leave. He wondered if Liliana ever thought about him.

He hoped, bitterly, that Liliana and Gideon both were having an awful night too.

A quiet cough and the snick of a knife made him turn, and he found himself looking straight up at three men, all of whom were clutching weapons and blocking his exit in a menacing fashion.

‘Your wallet,’ one of them grunted. 

Hamid groaned.

‘Just when I thought tonight couldn’t get any worse!’ he said, lamenting up to the heavens.

The three muggers just advanced towards him.

A slight shadow dropped down suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, landing catlike on the ground between Hamid and his attackers.

‘Hey,’ said a voice ringing with London charm. ‘You shouldn’t be doing that.’

Hamid watched, confused by the rapid turn of events, as the silent shadow took out two of the men with ease. The third, however, had snuck around behind in the chaos, and had his knife out and raised.

‘Look out!’ screamed Hamid. He felt panicked heat overwhelm him, gather up in his chest and expel out towards the mugger in a plume of fire. It caught on his sleeve, and as he tried to pat it out, the shadow took him down with a flash of its own knives.

‘Thanks,’ said the shadow, in the awkward silence of the aftermath. ‘For that.’

‘Umm,’ Hamid said. ‘No problem. Um… who are you?’

The silhouette just stared at him.

‘I’m Hamid Saleh Haroun al-Tahan,’ he said, gathering up what remained of his sanity and holding out a hand. ‘Thank you for saving my life.’

‘Sasha,’ said Sasha, reluctantly, taking his hand and shaking it carefully, like it might explode at any moment. ‘Thanks. You know. For saving my life, I guess.’

As they stared at each other in the dim light of the alley, loud slapping footsteps heralded Bertie’s arrival.

‘Hamid!’ he bellowed as he turned the corner. ‘I’ll protect you!’

As he charged, he slipped on a crisp packet and flew headfirst into the hard-concrete floor of the alley, where he lay still.

‘Oh, for the gods’ sakes,’ Hamid cried.

 

Between the two of them, Hamid and Sasha managed to drag Bertie out of the alley and to a nearby street to catch a taxi. Hamid paid the driver a large advance just so they would allow the swaying Bertie, bleeding profusely from a gash on his head, into the taxi. Once back at their house they struggled to manoeuvre him up the narrow stairs to the first floor.

‘Maybe we should have taken him to A&E,’ Hamid said, biting his lip worriedly. Sasha just looked at Bertie. They’d propped him up against the wall while Hamid dug out his house keys, and even with his face mushed into the floral wallpaper, Bertie was still managing to keep up a running nonsense commentary.

‘Nah,’ Sasha said. ‘He just needs to sleep it off. He’ll be fine. I’ve seen worse.’

Hamid wisely didn’t point out that Sasha’s ‘worse’ would probably equate to what Hamid would call ‘dead or dying’ and unlocked his front door instead.

‘Right,’ he said, pushing it open, ‘let’s get him inside and we can-‘

Bertie, at that moment, slid down the wall and hit the ground with an almighty crash that practically shook the whole building.

‘Oh dear,’ Sasha said, looking unconcerned.

A door above them slammed open.

‘What is all this racket? It’s two in the morning!’

The mystery neighbour – the short-but-not-as-short-as-Hamid west country accent from the morning – stomped down the stairs from the top floor to stare daggers at Sasha, Hamid, and Bertie’s unconscious form.

‘Um,’ Hamid said.

‘Is that blood?’

‘Uh,’ Sasha said.

‘Oh,’ said the neighbour. ‘Hello, Sasha.’

The angry neighbour pushed past both of them to peer down at Bertie’s head, which was still leaking. Hamid spared a momentary thought for the hall carpet.

‘What are you doing?’ Sasha asked, roughly, as the neighbour crouched over Bertie.

‘I’m a nurse,’ he said gruffly. ‘Get him inside. I’ll go get some stuff.’

Hamid watched, dazed, as he stomped back up the stairs.

 

It took them a little while to drag Bertie into the flat and up onto the sofa. His head and feet lolled comically off the edges. The new neighbour came back and as he tended to Bertie’s head, Hamid found out he was called Zolf and had recently been transferred to the local hospital.

‘And how do you two know each other?’ Hamid asked, gesturing between Zolf and Sasha.

‘AA,’ Zolf said, at the same time as Sasha said ‘Err… Weightwatchers.’

They stared at each other.

‘Both,’ Zolf said, finally. ‘It’s a… a joint thing.’

‘Oh,’ Hamid said, feeling a little confused. ‘I didn’t know that was a thing.’

‘It’s… a new scheme,’ Sasha said uncomfortably, perched on the windowsill. 

Hamid let it go.

‘What did this idiot do to hurt himself like this?’ Zolf asked as he dabbed away blood.

‘He took a pretty bad spill,’ Sasha supplied.

‘He was coming to help me get away from muggers,’ Hamid said loyally. Zolf’s head snapped up.

‘Are you ok?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ Hamid shrugged. ‘Sasha dealt with them pretty quickly.’

‘I’m sure she did.’

‘Hey, you helped. That… fire thing… you did, that was great. That what you get taught at posh places like this?’ Sasha asked.

‘No…’ Hamid frowned. ‘Or, they never taught me that spell, anyway. I’m not very good with magic. I’m failing my degree.’

‘You were pretty good at it tonight,’ Sasha pointed out.

Hamid couldn’t argue with that.

 

Once Bertie’s big head was bandaged, he started snoring fit to wake the dead. Zolf had checked him over and pronounced him as well as he could be, and stomped back up the stairs to his own flat, muttering about lost sleep. As he went, Hamid noticed that one of his legs was stiff and awkward-looking. A prosthetic certainly explained all the stamping around. Hamid had just assumed it was part of Zolf’s ornery personality.

Sasha vanished off into the night sometime after that, without saying goodbye, which Hamid assumed was pretty much her usual tactic.

Hamid watched Bertie snore for a little while, running over the night’s events in his mind until he couldn’t think clearly, and he finally took himself to bed.

 

Even before going to Prague, Hamid’s social circle had never been very big. It had been Liliana and Gideon, and Liliana’s friends, and Gideon’s friends, and Bertie. After Prague, that had narrowed down quite considerably to just Bertie, and whichever poor soul Bertie had tricked into sleeping with him.

After the fateful night of the mugging, his circle had grown to Bertie, Zolf, and Sasha, almost without any intervention on his end. 

The morning after the mugging, Zolf had come around to check on Bertie’s head wound and make absolutely sure that they didn’t need to take him to the hospital. Bertie, who had recovered almost completely, was an absolute pig about it, and Hamid had to make both tea and peace.

Zolf came around for tea relatively often after that, sometimes before he headed out on an evening shift, sometimes after he got back from a day shift, and other times on his way up to bed after a night shift. Hamid liked having tea with Zolf. Zolf ate almost as much as Hamid did, and it was nice to have conversations with an actual adult with a job – it took Hamid’s mind off of university work and helped him relax. Zolf had had an interesting life – his past work as a sailor and his strong connection with the god Poseidon alone meant he was full of interesting stories. And Zolf was fun to talk to, and they got on surprisingly well for having so little in common. There was a tense moment when Hamid trash-talked some tacky paperbacks he’d found in the hall, and it turned out that Zolf was a big fan – but they pushed past it.

Zolf and Bertie mainly just antagonised each other, but Hamid found that if he was there as a stabilising presence neither of them went too far in their vitriol.

Sasha just sort of appeared occasionally, ate their food, and used their television. She was a mystery in an enigma wrapped in dark clothes full of hidden knives – he still didn’t really know where she and Zolf knew each other from, since he knew that the joint AA/WW type club had definitely been a lie – but he assumed it had something to do with the matching signet rings they wore, and he didn’t pry further. He wasn’t entirely sure what it was that Sasha did, either. She had made vague noises in reference to being sent to Cambridge to value antiques, but she wore a lot more black and carried a lot more knives than the average antique dealer.

But she had saved Hamid’s life, so he didn’t ask.

 

Despite his new, sparkling social life, Hamid was still struggling with work. He’d taken the warning of the Head of Faculty to heart – he knew that he was only still in with a chance of graduating at the end of the year because Einstein had a soft spot for him and had pleaded his case, probably because he helped him out that time with Schrödinger’s cat – and he didn’t want to waste his precious second chance.

But the work was still extremely hard.

He had never been that good at school. His parents had long since given up expecting him to take over the family banking business, since he was hopeless at figures and even worse at business. The only thing he’d ever shown a hint of aptitude for had been magic. It was a worthy enough pursuit, and so his father had made a sizable donation to the University of Cambridge and Hamid had been shipped off to get a good degree.

He liked magic. He used it a lot – to tidy up his clothes, to neaten his hair, to make pretty lights dance around Liliana’s head just to see her smile – but he struggled to learn the new spells in class, failing miserably while the others watched and laughed behind their hands.

It didn’t help that this year, he was painfully aware of Liliana and Gideon sitting together in the back of the lecture halls, whispering to each other.

He sat right at the front, both so he could more easily pay attention, but also so he didn’t have to look at them. He tried to always be the first to arrive and the last to leave.

At least they both had practical lab in the morning, while his was in the afternoon, and so it was only people he vaguely knew who watched him fail repeatedly to cast even first year level spells.

After a particularly stressful day, Hamid arrived home to an empty flat, and was so frustrated and angry and upset he wasn’t sure whether or not to punch a wall or burst into tears.

 

The window of his bedroom opened up to the slightly sloping roof of the conservatory of the flat below. Hamid scrambled out and perched on his windowsill, looking down into the garden. Sasha always said that sitting up in high places relaxed her, and though his flat was only first floor, that was certainly high up enough for Hamid.

He took a deep breath of fresh air. It caught in his throat and made him cough.

He spluttered a few times, but it felt like something was still stuck in his throat. He coughed again, trying to dislodge whatever it was. It felt hot, almost, stinging and sore. He coughed more, eyes watering from the effort.

The sound of a window sliding open above him made it through the sound of his coughing and Hamid squinted upwards with blurry eyes.

‘Oh,’ said Zolf’s voice. ‘It’s you.’

‘Hi, Zolf,’ Hamid said, his voice scraping like sandpaper.

‘I could smell smoke and I thought it was that idiot’s friends again,’ Zolf said, peering down. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Smoke?’ Hamid frowned. ‘I was just… sitting. Looking at the view.’

They both looked out at the small suburban garden, a postage stamp of grass and a couple of scraggly trees.

‘Right,’ Zolf said, finally. ‘The view.’

‘Then I got a frog in my throat, or something,’ Hamid said.

‘That’s weird. I’m sure I smelt smoke,’ Zolf said. He glanced around the garden, looking over the fence to the gardens on either side. ‘Maybe one of the neighbours is having a barbeque or something.’

‘In November?’ Hamid asked. ‘I couldn’t smell anything.’

Zolf just harrumphed in a slightly embarrassed way. He looked tired, his eyes red-rimmed and sore, his hair and beard a tousled mess.

‘Did I wake you?’ Hamid asked, worriedly. ‘Sorry, I can go back inside.’

‘Nah,’ Zolf said. ‘I couldn’t get to sleep. I was… uh… reading.’

‘Oh.’ Hamid didn’t want another argument about literature, so he said nothing.

‘Do you want company?’ Zolf asked, a little hesitantly. ‘You look a bit… stressed.’

‘I feel stressed,’ Hamid admitted.

‘There’s practically steam coming out of your ears.’

Hamid laughed, but Zolf’s face was serious.

‘I’d love some company,’ Hamid replied.

 

They sat on the sofa, and Hamid made tea. From close up, Zolf looked even worse – his face was ashen under his beard, and the bags under his eyes were deeper and darker than usual.

‘I’ve been taking a few more night shifts,’ he said, as they settled. ‘There’s been some staffing issues.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like we don’t have enough staff.’

‘Oh dear.’ Hamid sipped his tea. It was too hot, and he frowned down at it.

‘What about you?’ Zolf asked, a little hesitantly.

‘Oh, you know,’ Hamid said, his voice light and breezy even as his chest clenched tight with anxiety, ‘I’m failing all my courses because I can’t do magic, and if I don’t pass this semester then I don’t get my degree and I get kicked out of uni, and most likely disowned, and my ex-fiancée and my ex-best friend are in all my lectures and I can’t do anything right!’

Hamid’s voice had grown higher and higher, and he finished speaking red-faced and out of breath.

Zolf’s eyes were wide, but he wasn’t looking at Hamid.

‘Hamid,’ Zolf said. Hamid looked at where Zolf was pointing.

His tea was bubbling like it was boiling.

Hamid panicked and threw it away from himself. The mug broke in half on the coffee table and the tea ran off the glass surface and onto the carpet.

 

‘Right,’ Zolf said, later, in the garden. ‘So you obviously are good at magic – or you wouldn’t be able to do it by accident.’

Hamid squinted at him through the wintry sunshine.

‘Is that how it works?’

‘You perform magic effortlessly – without words, components, anything – when you’re feeling some strong emotion,’ Zolf continued. ‘Like earlier, with your tea, and in the alley with the muggers.’

‘Sasha told you about that?’

‘I remember you talking about it, from the night we met,’ Zolf said, and if Hamid didn’t know better he’d have said Zolf was blushing. ‘And Sasha may have mentioned the fact that you literally breathed fire at the one trying to sneak attack her.’

‘Oh, well, not literally,’ Hamid said.

‘No. Seriously. That’s what Sasha saw,’ Zolf insisted. ‘Flames, from your mouth.’

Hamid only remembered a plume of fire emanating from him very vaguely, since at that moment in time he had been so caught up in panic and helplessness.

‘Oh,’ he managed.

‘So,’ Zolf said. ‘It’s as safe as it can be out here. Try and get some of that energy back that you had earlier. That angry hopelessness.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ Hamid muttered, and ‘this is stupid,’ but he reached inside and brought up the misery of sitting at the front of lecture halls, so painfully aware of Liliana and Gideon behind him, laughing together, talking, happy without him. He replayed that afternoon in practical labs where he had tried and failed to cast invisibility on himself and had heard the mocking laughter of his peers as they stood unseen around him.

The hot, sick feeling of failure and anxiety curdled hot and sick in his chest again, and he felt his heartrate increase.

‘That’s it,’ Zolf said, ‘you’re getting there-‘

Hamid lifted up his head and screamed at the sky.

Or, he tried to scream. Instead what emanated from his throat was a roar of a magnitude he would have thought impossible from his small frame. With that roar came a pillar of fire that reached almost fifteen foot into the air.

When the fire stopped, Hamid had to bend over his knees, breathing heavily, his throat hot and scratchy. 

Zolf had ducked to the floor to avoid the flames, but he whooped as he stood.

‘Bad at magic, my arse,’ he said, grinning fit to burst behind his beard.

Hamid coughed out a smoke ring.

‘But… how? I’ve never been taught fire magic.’

Zolf shrugged. 

‘Natural talent?’

‘But you can’t do magic without being taught the spells first!’ Hamid cried. ‘That’s the first thing you learn!’

Zolf shrugged again.

‘Clearly you can.’

‘I don’t know how this helps with my degree,’ Hamid said, a little mulishly.

‘Try and do another spell – one you have been taught – but like how you did the whole flame bit just now.’

It sounded like a good enough idea, and Hamid didn’t have anything better, so he closed his eyes, frowned, and concentrated on his anger. This time, when he felt the heat molten in his chest, he thought hard about the invisibility spell he was supposed to have learnt that morning.

‘Er, Hamid?’ Zolf’s voice was strangely wobbly. Hamid opened his eyes to see Zolf looking around intently, as though he couldn’t see Hamid any more.

Hamid waved. Zolf’s eyes slid right past him, as though… as though he were invisible.

Hamid walked closer. He waved a hand right in front of Zolf’s eyes. Zolf didn’t flinch.

‘I did it!’ he cried, releasing that feeling and letting himself pop back into existence. ‘I did it!’

Zolf’s face transformed instantly from worry to pride.

‘You did,’ he grinned, wider than Hamid had ever seen.

Hamid, flushed with happiness and relief and success, didn’t stop to think before leaning forward, up on his toes, and kissing Zolf full on the mouth.

 

‘I don’t know why I did it,’ Hamid wailed, later that evening, perched anxiously on the roof of the student’s union.

Sasha, crouched beside him, looking completely at home, shrugged.

‘Sorry, Hamid,’ she said, ‘I don’t know Zolf that well. Or much about kissing people in general, really.’

‘He ran away,’ Hamid groaned, head in his hands.

‘Probably not very fast,’ Sasha pointed out. ‘Not with his leg. Did you try and catch him?’

Hamid had just watched Zolf hobble speedily away as the realisation of what he’d just done settled cold and awful in his brain.

‘No,’ he said miserably. ‘I let him go. He’s been avoiding me.’

‘Probably because you didn’t catch him,’ Sasha pondered. She gazed out at the peaceful city skyline as a group of drunk students walked down the street below them, bellowing out the YMCA. ‘Hamid,’ she said, ‘do you like Zolf?’

‘Yes?’

‘No, I mean, do you _like him_ , like him. Do you get that feeling when you see him like you get when you see someone do some, um, really great parkour, that kind of thing?’

‘I mean, not so much the parkour for me,’ Hamid said, slowly. ‘But… I think so? I like to spend time with him. He makes me feel better. We can talk about stuff. We’ve only ever really fallen out once properly, but I don’t think it counts if it’s about Harrison Campbell literature.’

‘I quite like Campbell’s stuff,’ Sasha said thoughtfully. ‘He’s an alright bloke, too. Bit nervous, though.’

Hamid stared at Sasha.

‘Who _are_ you?’ he asked.

Sasha flinched a little.

‘No one. Why? Who’s asking?’

Hamid just shook his head.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, quickly.

They stared out at the bustling nightlife for a while in peaceful silence.

‘Do you think Zolf… likes me?’ Hamid asked, quietly, hating how primary school he felt but desperate to know the answer.

Sasha, true to form, just shrugged.

‘He talks about you more than he talks about anyone else,’ she said. ‘That’s got to be something, right?’

Hamid had to admit that it was.

 

Zolf was avoiding him. He hadn’t been round for tea since the incident, and Hamid never saw him in the hall. The only way he knew that Zolf was even still upstairs were the odd stomping noises heralding the beginning or end of his shifts.

Hamid thought about ambushing him on the stairs as he left for the hospital but was too cowardly to actually go through with it. Not to mention he didn’t know what he would even say.

Typical to the university experience, as his social life withered, his academic success increased. Rather than listen to his lecturers about spellcraft and components, Hamid instead reached for the hot core inside his chest and drew from that to perform his magic. His marks instantly improved, and each time it became a little easier.

It relieved him to realise he had never been stupid, or bad at magic. It just came to him a little differently, that was all.

He tried not to think about why that might be.

 

In the last few weeks before the winter holiday, even with his newfound ability with magic, Hamid was snowed under with work. There were still magic theory and spellcraft essays to write, after all, even if he did get a hundred percent in the practical exam.

He went out with Bertie less and less, and got up earlier to go to the library. As he was ninety percent of Bertie’s impulse control, that meant he had breakfast with Wilde much more often than he would have liked.

A week to go, and Wilde smirked at him across the breakfast counter.

‘How is the work going, Hamid?’

‘Fine,’ Hamid said, trying not to squirm in discomfort.

‘Right! Out!’ Bertie boomed, storming out from his bedroom and throwing clothes at Wilde’s head.

‘Alright,’ Wilde sighed as he pulled on his – now rather rumpled – shirt and trousers. Hamid stared down at his cereal and tried very hard not to hate both Wilde and Bertie.

The moment Wilde was decent Bertie started to manhandle him out of the door, practically pushing him down the stairs. The flat door swung closed behind them but didn’t shut completely, so Hamid could hear Wilde snarking and Bertie harrumphing as clearly as though they were still in the room.

‘You’re a conniving, poisonous – oh hello Mr Smith!’

Hamid froze.

‘Hello Bertie. Hello… Wilde.’

The disdain dripped from Zolf’s usually friendly voice. Zolf didn’t really like Bertie, but he had hated Wilde ever since the man had been draped across the sofa during one of his and Hamid’s tea chats and had been rather cutting about Zolf’s literary tastes.

‘Hello, Zolf,’ Wilde said, in his sickly-sweet tone. ‘Hamid’s having breakfast, if you were heading there before yours?’

Hamid wished he could see what was happening just so he could see Zolf’s expression, because Wilde let out a long, low whistle in response.

‘Oh dear. Trouble in paradise?’

‘Come on, Wilde, it’s time for you to leave!’

Bertie had obviously grown bored of the conversation and proceeded to drag Wilde out of the house, if Wilde’s protestations were anything to go by. Hamid thanked the gods for Bertie – something he rarely did.

There was silence afterwards, broken only by the faint creaking outside Hamid’s front door. Hamid kept still and silent the whole time, and wondered whether Zolf had crept past as stealthily as possible just to avoid even the potential of seeing Hamid.

Hamid thunked his head down on the kitchen counter. He’d really messed up.

 

‘You must be a sorcerer,’ Einstein chirped through skype.

‘But that’s impossible!’ Hamid said.

‘Well, do you learn these spells?’

‘No.’

‘Then it is impossible for you to be able to perform them! Unless, of course, you are a sorcerer!’

Hamid didn’t have an answer to that.

He had emailed Einstein to thank him for getting him the second chance at Cambridge with his slate wiped clean from Prague, but the professor had insisted on skyping ‘to catch up’ and had instead grilled him about his current progress.

‘But my family goes back generations of bankers,’ Hamid said. ‘There’s nothing there to give me any… any powers!’

‘There must be,’ Einstein said simply. ‘There is no other possibility!’

Einstein was often a bit dozy, and a lot mental, but Hamid had to admit that he had a point.

 

The inevitable meeting happened a week before winter solstice. Hamid, burnt out from working so hard and finally free after the end of the semester, ordered himself a takeaway and sat, exhausted, on the front step of his building to wait for the delivery.

Ten minutes later, Zolf came back from a day shift at the hospital. Hamid had his elbows on his knees, head in his hands, and so Zolf saw him first.

‘Oh,’ he said, stopping abruptly. 

Hamid’s head snapped up.

‘Oh,’ he said, miserably. ‘Hi Zolf. Just – just go past me.’

Zolf was almost past him when he paused. Hamid gritted his teeth.

‘Hamid – are you ok?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, staring out at the street, desperately wishing his food order would miraculously turn up half an hour early.

‘You – uh – you don’t look fine. Did – did the rest of the semester go well?’

‘Zolf,’ Hamid sighed, ‘please, I’d rather you just kept on avoiding me than have to… to do this.’

‘This?’

‘You know.’ Hamid waved a hand in the air, still looking determinedly away from Zolf. ‘Making awkward small talk with each other and trying to pretend that I didn’t ruin our friendship.’

There was silence for a long while – so long that Hamid wondered whether Zolf had gone in the house already and he’d just zoned out completely and not heard the door close.

Then Zolf sat down heavily beside him on the step, his body too close and radiating heat.

‘I thought I was the one who ruined our friendship,’ Zolf said quietly.

‘I’m the one who kissed you,’ Hamid choked. 

‘I’m the one who panicked and ran away,’ Zolf said. ‘Hamid – you’re young. Attractive. Extraordinarily talented. I have a poorly paid job with intense hours and nightshift work, I have a prosthetic that hurts when it rains, and I’m at least ten years older than you. I’m – I don’t get to have this. Not with you.’

‘Eight,’ Hamid said.

‘What?’

‘Eight years older than me,’ Hamid said, not a little mulishly. ‘That’s smaller than the age gap between my parents.’

Zolf sighed heavily.

‘I ordered a lot of takeaway,’ Hamid said, after a little while. ‘Are you hungry?’

There were a few seconds of quiet, during which Hamid could practically hear the cogs turning in Zolf’s brain.

Then, finally, he spoke.

‘I am hungry,’ he said, as he reached out to take Hamid’s hand. 

Hamid could barely contain his happiness.

‘I’m pretty ravenous too,’ Sasha said, dropping down from somewhere unknown. ‘And congratulations – I’ve been waiting for you two to kiss and make up for ages.’

Hamid squeaked in shock.

‘Gods, Sasha!’

‘I brought you this,’ she said, thrusting a pile of folded cloth at Hamid.

‘Um, thanks?’ he said, as he unfurled it. It was an old-ish cloak.

‘I heard you chattin to that nutty professor the other day,’ Sasha said, nonchalantly, as though hanging around friends’ houses and listening in to their private conversations was something all normal people did. ‘We got this in at work, and I thought it would be helpful.’

‘What is it?’

‘S’a cloak,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Hamid said slowly, ‘but what can it do to help me?’

‘What happened?’ Zolf asked, looking completely lost.

‘My old professor from Prague thinks I might be a sorcerer,’ Hamid explained, taking pity on Zolf and relieved that apparently not everyone knew all his secrets.

‘That would make sense,’ Zolf admitted. ‘Is there anything in your family history?’

‘That’s the thing – I don’t know.’

‘The cloak’ll tell you,’ Sasha prompted.

‘How?’

‘It’s magic,’ she said, proudly. ‘Worth a bunch, too, so I need to return it sooner rather than later or Gusset’ll have my guts for garters. You put it on, and it magicks your genealogy on the back.’

‘That’s actually brilliant,’ Hamid breathed, staring down at the unassuming material. Sasha’s face twitched, and for her it was practically a beaming grin.

‘Told you it’d help,’ she said, not a little smugly.

‘Well, go on, then,’ Zolf said. ‘Put it on.’

Hamid swirled the cloak over his shoulders, anticipation tingling in his belly. There was quiet, and then the material began to glow.

‘What does it say?’ he asked, trying to look over his shoulder. Sasha and Zolf gathered close to look.

‘Gods, Hamid, your family was busy,’ Zolf said.

‘It’s still going,’ Sasha said, a little later.

It took almost a minute for all the names to scroll out, and when the glow finally died down, Hamid peered over at them excitedly.

‘Well? What does it say?’

Both Sasha and Zolf were pale and ashen in the fluorescent light of the streetlamps.

‘Uh,’ Zolf said, clearing his throat.

‘No way,’ Sasha breathed.

‘What?’ Hamid, impatient, ripped the cloak off to look at the name at the very bottom. ‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘That’s – that’s a meritocrat.’

‘Hamid,’ Zolf said, his voice sounding a little strangled. ‘When – when Sasha and I said we knew each other from AA meetings-‘

‘Weightwatchers,’ Sasha inputted.

‘You lied,’ Hamid rolled his eyes, ‘I know. You guys aren’t exactly subtle.’

‘Well – we actually…’

Hamid had never seen Zolf so lost for words before, and he couldn’t help but get a little panicked.

‘What? It’s not, like, a group of people with terminal illnesses, is it? Are you both going to die? Leaving me with just Bertie?!’

‘What?’ No!’ Zolf said, taking Hamid’s hands. ‘Calm down, Hamid. Breathe.’

‘What Zolf’s trying to say is that we belong to a secret organisation that’s trying to bring down the meritocracy,’ Sasha said.

Hamid just stared.

‘Mainly because of our families,’ Sasha continued, ‘rather than any particular political leanings. But that’s why we’re both in Cambridge, anyway. They’re setting up a small network here and we were sent to flesh it out a bit with our respective skills.’ Sasha frowned. ‘Oh. I hope that doesn’t affect your new relationship.’

‘Fuck,’ Hamid said, with feeling.


	2. as I will be

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The continuing adventures of Hamid at Cambridge university. Or the story of how Hamid keeps acquiring more friends and he's not entirely sure how.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So instead of writing my RQBB or working on my PhD this happened. The recent RQG episodes have hurt me emotionally and this came out as my love letter to the characters we've lost along the way.
> 
> And once I started writing it I couldn't stop.
> 
> I added this as another chapter rather than a separate story because it's more of a direct continuation than a sequel, and so the whole story is in one place.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

Hamid got the call at three in the morning. He got to the hospital by quarter to four. He didn’t bother to do more than pull a hoodie on over his pyjamas and slip his feet into last summer’s espadrilles. 

Wilde was sitting in the waiting room, legs crossed, staring vacantly at a magazine. He glanced up when Hamid ran in. He looked pale, tired, and uncharacteristically dishevelled.

‘What happened?’ Hamid gasped, clutching his chest – he’d run all the way from the taxi rank to A&E, barely stopping to shove a twenty-pound note at the driver and tell him to keep the change.  
Wilde shrugged.

 

‘They didn’t tell me,’ he said. ‘Just rushed him in.’

‘They’ll tell me,’ Hamid said. ‘I’m his emergency contact.’

But the receptionist – kind, unflappable, and firm – told him that they could only tell Hamid what had happened to Bertie when she herself knew, and that for now, all they could do was wait.

‘He went down hard,’ Wilde said, later, after a couple of watery, lukewarm coffees from the vending machine in the hall. Hamid stared down into the polystyrene cup. ‘I didn’t even see – I just heard the noise.’

It was the last thing Hamid wanted to talk about, so he said nothing.

Sasha rocked up half an hour later, fully dressed in her usual black leather jacket despite it being five in the morning.

‘Zolf sent me a message,’ she muttered, at Hamid’s questioning look. ‘You, uh - want another coffee?’

‘Sure,’ Hamid said. ‘Thanks.’ He didn’t either need or want another cup of shitty coffee in the early hours of the morning, but it was something warm to hold onto. He was beginning to regret not changing out of his pyjamas.

‘You ok?’ Sasha asked later, having returned with the coffees and pointedly not got one for Wilde. She said it so quietly that Hamid wasn’t sure if he imagined it.

‘I don’t know,’ Hamid said, honestly.

Sasha patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. 

All of a sudden tears started to burn hot and sharp in his throat, and Hamid had to fight to hold them in. Sasha retreated back to her own uncomfortable chair after the desultory pat, but having her there was a comfort in itself. Together they waited in silence.

Zolf shuffled up twenty minutes later, wearing large dark rings under his eyes and scrubs with cartoon teddy bears on them. 

‘Just got off shift,’ he said, slumping onto the uncomfortable plastic seat next to Hamid and wrapping a large, warm arm around his shoulders. ‘I haven’t heard any news. Sorry, Hamid.’

‘No news is good news, right?’ Sasha said, attempting a grin.

Hamid looked between the two of them – so worried and concerned, despite neither of them liking Bertie very much – or in Zolf’s case, at all. They were at the hospital in the awful waiting room at six in the morning for him. Just the thought of having such good friends almost set him off crying again, but he manfully held them back and snuggled instead into Zolf’s side. He had been getting rather chilly in just his pyjamas.

Another nurse appeared not long after, and her face was grave. Hamid immediately feared the worst.

‘He’s not… dead?’ he asked, voice cracking on the word.

‘No,’ she said, ‘though we’ve done all we can. He’s in a coma. You can go and see him, if you’d like, but he’s unresponsive.’

Hamid looked to Wilde.

‘You go,’ Wilde said. ‘I’ll see you at our meeting on Friday.’

And he tucked a magazine under his arm, turned smartly on his heel, and walked out of the room.

‘Of all the cold, unfeeling-‘ Zolf began, but Hamid put a gentle hand on his arm.

‘He’s… it’s hard, for him,’ Hamid said, quietly. ‘I’d like to go and see him, please,’ he said, turning to the nurse.

Bertie looked small and pale in the hospital bed, surrounded by the various machines keeping him alive.

‘There’s only so much magic and medicine can do,’ Zolf said, a heavy hand on Hamid’s shoulder.

Hamid just stared down at Bertie’s face. It was strange to see it so still and quiet. So un-Bertie-like. It was a face meant for noise and movement.

‘Poor Bertie,’ Sasha said, quietly. 

Hamid turned away.

 

*

 

It had been a rough few months. Hamid’s winter solstice present to Zolf had been tickets to see Harrison Campbell give a talk at a bookshop in London, complete with book signing. Sasha, who apparently had not been lying when she said she’d met the man before, had a ticket of her own and went along with them. 

Bertie, determined not to be left out, had also tagged along – much to Zolf’s disgust. Bertie had then proceeded to monopolise the whole question and answer session, insult Campbell in the book-signing line, and get all four of them thrown out of the event.

Zolf had been spitting mad, to the point where Hamid wondered whether _he_ would start breathing fire too.

It had very definitely not been the romantic trip to London Hamid had envisioned when buying the tickets.

Zolf and Bertie ignored each other after that, except for when they sniped at each other. It drove Hamid mad. It also brought a resurgence of Wilde into their lives, because as much as Bertie didn’t like Wilde, he knew that Zolf disliked him even more.

And it was Hamid who had to deal with the awkward breakfasts, where all three other diners would refuse to talk to one another and instead talk exclusively to him.

Then Bertie had a screaming row with Wilde, too, and absconded suddenly on the university ski trip to follow his one true obsession, Edward the rower, he with the exceptional arse and lonely three brain cells. Hamid had no idea Bertie had even left Cambridge until he got sent the first video of Bertie getting drunk in a chalet somewhere in the alps, shouting into his phone that he’d ‘borrowed a little money, should be back in a week or so’, one arm around the long-suffering Edward.

That ended with a screaming row between Bertie, Edward’s on-again off-again boyfriend Tjelvar, and Edward himself. Bertie appeared back at the flat unusually quiet and docile, and Hamid had enjoyed a few days of peace. 

Zolf hadn’t been particularly happy, but Bertie kept his head down and didn’t even bring Wilde around much, and Zolf softened a little.

Then Bertie told Hamid that he was going out, more fish in the sea and all that, can’t let the blighters keep you down, and Hamid had wished him well and snuggled back to watch Netflix with Zolf until he left for his night shift and Hamid went to bed.

And then the phone rang at three in the morning.

 

*

 

The healer assigned to Bertie’s case was a little aloof, but seemed very capable. Erin Fairhands explained very clearly that they’d done all they can, and the rest was up to Bertie. 

 

‘He wakes up when he wakes up,’ Erin said. ‘I’m really very sorry about this.’

Hamid sat at Bertie’s beside for a while, staring into the middle distance, unsure about what he felt. His chest felt empty, somehow. Bertie was awful, but he was his oldest friend. And there was something so… wrong… about seeing his larger-than-life friend so still and quiet.

‘Come on,’ Sasha said, tapping his shoulder lightly. ‘Let’s go look for snacks. I’m sure I saw some vending machines back in the corridor.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah. I’m good at knowing stuff like that.’

Hamid trustingly followed her out of the room.

Half an hour later, no wiser as to the location of the vending machines, Sasha finally admitted she was lost. 

‘This doesn’t usually happen to me,’ she said, wringing her hands. ‘Sorry, Hamid.’

‘It’s ok,’ he sighed. ‘I guess we can just… ask for directions?’

‘Are you lost?’ boomed a voice from above him.

Hamid had to crane his neck back to see where it had come from. The woman who spoke was built more like Bertie than Sasha, but her face was much friendlier than either. Hamid smiled timidly up at her, then realised that he recognised her.

‘You’re – you work with Healer Fairhands?’

She nodded, beaming so wide she practically shone with pride.

‘Yes. We’ve been transferred from the Hospital of Aphrodite in Cairo.’

‘Cairo! My family live in Cairo,’ Hamid said excitedly. He switched to Arabic. ‘I’m Hamid, by the way. How are you finding Cambridge?’

‘Cold,’ she admitted. ‘Wetter than I expected.’

Sasha was staring open-mouthed at the newcomer, and Hamid immediately felt rude.

‘Sorry; this is Sasha,’ he said, changing back to English.

‘Hi,’ Sasha managed.

‘Azu,’ said Azu.

‘Azu,’ Hamid said, shaking her hand. It dwarfed his own. ‘I don’t suppose you have some free time? Sasha and I have managed to get horribly lost.’

‘Oh, of course!’ Azu boomed. 

Azu led them to the hospital café, where they stocked up on food – it was getting towards mid-morning, and Hamid’s stomach was already rumbling – before letting their new friend guide them back to Bertie’s hospital room. Zolf was inside, looking awkward.

‘Ah, there you are,’ he said, smiling in relief as they all trooped in. He kissed Hamid’s cheek – Hamid’s mouth was full of sandwich. ‘Oh, Azu, good to see you.’

‘Ah, Zolf? You are also friends of Hamid and Sasha?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, smiling at her, a proprietary hand on Hamid’s shoulder. ‘I’ve told you about Hamid.’

‘Oooh, _that_ Hamid,’ Azu said. 

Zolf blushed a little.

‘We share a few wards,’ he explained. ‘I showed Azu around when she started. How are you doing, Hamid?’

Hamid shrugged, swallowed his large mouthful of sandwich.

‘Ok, I think,’ he said, as honestly as he could. He shot a look at Bertie’s still figure, at the beeping machines surrounding the bed. ‘I need to sort out the paperwork, but I’m going to get him moved to a private hospital once he’s stable enough. To free up bed space here,’ he clarified. ‘And… you know. To keep him comfortable.’

Zolf frowned. ‘And you’ll be paying for this?’

‘Of course,’ Hamid said. Zolf frowned deeper, but for once did not press the issue. Hamid knew that one of Zolf’s main issues with Bertie was the way he so vicariously and voraciously spent Hamid’s money. It had caused a few arguments between Hamid and Zolf, too. But Hamid wasn’t in the mood to argue about that right now, and Zolf was apparently sensitive enough to notice.

‘Right now, though,’ Hamid said, taking one last look at Bertie before turning away, ‘I just want to go home.’

 

*

 

Hamid continued with university work but didn’t go to his personal tutor meeting. He was mainly acting on autopilot but couldn’t face seeing Wilde, his last memory of the man being his pale and drawn face lit harsh by the fluorescent lights in the hospital waiting room.

Zolf came around to visit as much as his shifts allowed. Sasha was around more often than usual too, a quiet presence in the background while Hamid worked on his essays, flipping a seemingly endless supply of knives from out of her sleeves. 

The first Saturday after he’d completed all the paperwork and had Bertie transferred to a private institution just outside of Cambridge, when Hamid had no lectures to distract him and had run out of coursework to do, he sat listlessly in his flat, staring at the tv.

Sasha dropped noiselessly onto the sofa beside him, with only the dip of her weight on the cushions alerting Hamid to her presence.

‘Oh. Hi, Sasha,’ Hamid said.

‘`ello, Hamid,’ Sasha said. ‘Uh – what are you doing?’

Hamid tried to focus his eyes on the tv.

‘Watching Bargain Hunt,’ he said. ‘I think?’

‘It’s lunchtime.’

‘Is it?’ Hamid looked at the fancy carriage clock above the fireplace. ‘Oh yeah. So it is.’

There was silence. Bargain Hunt played merrily on.

‘Aren’t… you going to have lunch?’ Sasha asked.

‘Nah,’ Hamid said, still staring at the screen mindlessly. ‘Not really hungry.’

‘Right, that’s it,’ Sasha said, clapping her hands together. ‘Get up, Hamid.’ She grabbed him under his armpits and hoisted him off the sofa, before switching the tv off at the wall. ‘We’re going out for lunch.’

Hamid wasn’t quite so dozy as to let Sasha drag him through the streets on a cold spring day, so he hailed a taxi. Sasha bundled him inside and slammed the door shut before telling the driver their destination.

‘Hospital, please,’ she said. ‘Quick chop – it’s an emergency.’

‘The hospital?’ Hamid asked. Then the driver – clearly taking Sasha’s words to heart – put his foot right down on the accelerator and Hamid had to scramble for his seat belt.

He didn’t see Sasha on her phone, but she must have called ahead, because Zolf was standing at the taxi rank outside the hospital when their enthusiastic driver screeched to a halt.

‘It’s bad, Zolf,’ Sasha called, already out of the taxi and striding towards him. ‘He said he wasn’t hungry.’

Hamid scrambled to get out the taxi too, after thrusting a tenner at the driver, cursing his short legs.

‘It’s really not that bad,’ he said, a little out of breath. ‘Honestly.’

Zolf just tugged him in closer for a hug.

‘Come and have lunch with me and Azu,’ he said. ‘We’ve only just sat down.’

Hamid relaxed into Zolf’s arms, breathing in his usual smell – the deodorant he used, the disinfectant from the hospital, his current brand of laundry soap.

‘The canteen here’s awful,’ he said, but it wasn’t a true protest.

The canteen was very busy, but Azu waved them over enthusiastically from where she sat at a four-seater table. 

‘Hello again,’ she said, beaming, at Hamid and Sasha. 

Hamid smiled a little weakly in response – Sasha just looked a little overwhelmed. Being beamed at by Azu wasn’t unlike being hit by a lorry.

‘Come on, Hamid – let’s get you some food,’ Zolf said, dragging him off to the food queue.

‘Will Sasha be alright there by herself?’ Hamid asked, sotte voce. Sasha wasn’t precisely the most outgoing or talkative of people – from what Hamid could tell, she made friends by just hanging around until she was sure she wasn’t going to be sent away. Azu was loud and cheerful and larger than life, from his own experience and from the stories Zolf told about work. The two women were polar opposites.

‘She’ll be fine,’ Zolf said. ‘Trust me.’

To Hamid’s relief, when they got back to the table with a tray heaped with food (he’d discovered his appetite somewhere in the line for the hot food section) Sasha was shyly demonstrating her knife wrist sheathes to Azu. 

Hamid had never asked why an antiques dealer would need wrist sheathes, and after seeing the sharp knives in them, he hadn’t really wanted to.

It was nice to have lunch with the three of them, even if it was at the hospital. Bertie wasn’t a few floors above him anymore, but it still brought back those feelings of helplessness and despair.

But he had Zolf with him, and Sasha, and now Azu, too, and so it beat sitting at home watching Bargain Hunt and marinating in his own depression.

As they finished eating, however, and Zolf began shooting guilty looks at his nurse fob watch, the heavy feeling began to creep back over Hamid at the thought of going home to his empty flat and watching mindless tv.

‘Azu, you’re done for the day, right?’ Zolf said, out of nowhere, as he began to tidy up their lunch trays.

‘Yes,’ she said. 

There was silence after that – Hamid looked up to see Zolf and Sasha staring intensely at each other, as though trying hard to have a completely silent conversation without the use of telepathy.

Sasha broke eye contact first, and she didn’t look particularly happy about it.

‘Hey, Hamid,’ she said awkwardly, ‘I’ve never shown you my knife collection, have I?’

‘Actually,’ Hamid said, ‘you showed me back before winter solstice.’ Sasha had taken them all – Bertie included, although Hamid felt that Bertie had more invited himself along rather than Sasha actually wanting him there – up to her small attic room above Beamish’s Antiques. Her knife collection was pretty extensive, Hamid had to admit, and some of the magical ones were quite interesting. Bertie had banged his head on a low beam and grumbled the entire time, and Zolf had snapped at him, and they’d all trooped back down to street level a bit more fractious than they’d been going up.

‘Oh.’ She frowned, then perked back up. ‘Azu, would _you_ like to see my knife collection?’

Azu beamed.

‘I would be delighted!’

‘Right. Good. Have fun, everyone,’ Zolf said, waving goodbye to the others and dropping a quick kiss on Hamid’s mouth. ‘Make sure Azu doesn’t break anything in that shop,’ Zolf muttered in Hamid’s ear, winking, before hurrying off into the hospital proper.

And so Hamid found himself dragged back to Sasha’s attic room to look at more knives, quite against his will. There were a few hair-raising moments in the antique shop where Azu turned a little too fast and forgot about her elbows, but Hamid caught the sculpture that took a header to the wooden floor before it smashed and felt better than he had done for days.

 

*

 

Work kept Hamid busy – the spring term was no more hectic than the winter, and even though he was better at the magic he still struggled with the theory. His new habit of sitting right at the front of the lecture theatre paid off, as it made it much easier to concentrate, and he actually found himself enjoying the work.

At the end of one lecture, as he waited for the other students to filter out of the theatre doors, Hamid checked his email and was delighted to find one from one of the friends he’d made at Prague University. He and Grizzop hadn’t shared any classes but had bonded over the fact that neither of them was originally from Prague or Czechoslovakia, and that they were both rather unlucky in the height department. Grizzop was even smaller than Hamid, but while Hamid aimed for petit and gentle and kind, Grizzop was two hundred kilograms of rage in a forty-five kilogram body. Grizzop had been one of the only ones Hamid kept in contact with from Prague, and Hamid had liked him. His email was friendly and asked if Hamid knew any places to stay in Cambridge – Grizzop had just found out he’d gotten into the masters’ programme he’d wanted there and would be moving as soon as he finished his current academic year at Prague in the early summer.

Hamid wrote back that he had a spare room in his flat and would be happy to let Grizzop stay, free of charge.

He only briefly thought of Bertie as he typed.

The background noise of the theatre had died down – Hamid took that to mean that most of the others had left and that the way out would be clearer, so he began to pack away his laptop.

A hand landed on his arm and he almost jumped out of his skin. He whirled around to see Liliana looking sadly at him, her manicured nails still resting on his arm, her eyes large and soulful. Behind her, Gideon shuffled about awkwardly, hands shoved in his pockets, his eyes fixed firmly on his shoes.

‘I heard about Bertie,’ Liliana said, her mouth a delicate moue of sadness. ‘I’m so sorry, Hamid.’

Hamid froze for a few seconds, eyes darting between his ex and his ex-best friend. Then he gathered his faculties and cleared his throat. He swung his leather satchel over his shoulder, roughly displacing Liliana’s hand, and shrugged.

‘Thanks,’ he said, before pushing past them as quickly as he could without barging into them too hard and escaping out the lecture theatre doors.

He ranted about it later to Zolf over dinner.

‘What motive could they possibly have to talk to me?’ he asked, stabbing down at his potatoes. One shot off his plate and rolled onto the floor, and Hamid flung his hands up into the air in frustration.

‘Maybe they were just being considerate,’ Zolf tried. ‘Leave it,’ he said, as Hamid began to get off his chair to search for the rogue potato. ‘I’ll get it later.’

‘No,’ Hamid said darkly, settling back into his seat. ‘I know them – both of them. They wouldn’t do that just out of the kindness of their hearts. Maybe they want to up their public image? Make it look like they weren’t the ones who abandoned me when I got back from Prague?’

‘You said the lecture theatre was empty,’ Zolf pointed out.

‘Maybe they were recording themselves?’ Hamid tried.

‘Look, Hamid, I like them as little as you do – probably even less, since I’ve only known them as being awful people. But,’ and Zolf winced a little, as though preparing for an outburst, ‘don’t you think you’re being a little bit… paranoid?’

‘Me? Paranoid?’ Hamid heard his voice get higher and squeakier but couldn’t stop it. ‘They’re the ones who left me! Why would they come over and try to make nice? Surely they know I would see straight through it? I think I’m allowed to be a little paranoid after they spread the rumours that I cheated on Liliana in Prague and made me look like the bad guy! And not only that, but we’ve never really dealt with the fact that you and Sasha and your families are part of a secret organisation to take down the meritocrats who not only rule the whole world, but also one of them is apparently my ancestor and is the source of all my magic!’

Hamid was breathing hard, the familiar heat in his chest and roiling hot and thick in his throat. Embarrassingly, tears were welling in his eyes, too, and he didn’t know whether he wanted to breathe fire or burst into tears.

Zolf’s eyes were wide and panicked.

‘Ok, Hamid just – calm down, ok?’ 

Between Hamid’s bleary, furious blinks, Zolf was out of his chair and kneeling next to his chair, one hand wrapping around both of Hamid’s, one warm and heavy and comforting in his hair and at the top of his neck.

‘Breathe,’ Zolf said, and Hamid, after swallowing the burgeoning fire in his throat, hiccupped a giggle.

‘That’s the last thing you want me to do,’ he said, looking directly into Zolf’s face, ‘unless you really don’t like your eyebrows.’

‘Look – ignore Liliana and Gideon, ok? They’re not part of your life anymore. Don’t let them back in.’

Hamid was about to complain that it wasn’t that easy, but Zolf moved his hands to either side of Hamid’s face and held him there, looking into his eyes.

‘Ok?’ Zolf repeated, squeezing gently. 

‘Ok,’ Hamid said. 

‘And the harlequin thing – it’s just meetings, really. Nothing like as bad as you think. You can come to one, if you want.’

‘Am I allowed?’

‘Sure,’ Zolf shrugged. ‘They don’t mind newcomers as long as you’re not, you know, an undercover policeman or government agent or anything. Besides, both me and Sasha’ll vouch for you.’

‘But…’ Hamid whispered. ‘My family-‘

‘As long as you don’t wear that cloak no one will guess,’ Zolf pointed out. ‘It’s not like it’s written on your forehead. Maybe don’t do any magic, though,’ he added.

Hamid rolled his eyes.

‘I’m not that stupid.’

‘You’ll come?’ 

‘Yeah,’ Hamid shrugged. Zolf grinned and squeezed his hands again.

‘Brilliant. I promise, it’s nothing to worry about. Honestly.’

Hamid trusted Zolf, perhaps the most of anyone he’d ever met.

‘Ok,’ he said quietly. ‘Ok.’

 

*

 

Just as Zolf had said, the meeting was surprisingly boring and bureaucratic. It mainly consisted of a couple of talks, given by local members of the community with various grievances that they believed stemmed from the meritocracy, and a couple radicals throwing out their own political ideologies for debate. Afterwards, there was tea and coffee, and the fancy biscuits that came in boxes with menus on the inside of the lids.

Hamid hovered nervously between Zolf and Sasha, a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand and a Viennese Whirl in the other.

He even recognised a few fellow students from the uni, though he avoided their eyes.

‘See,’ Zolf said, rubbing his arm comfortingly. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

‘Yeah,’ Sasha said, frowning at the middle-aged crowd milling about with their hot drinks and cosy cardigans, ‘pretty dead, really. Not nearly as exciting as the ones in London.’

‘Oh?’ Hamid squeaked.

‘Yeah,’ Sasha said, blithely ignoring the death glare Zolf was shooting her way, ‘there it was all, ‘where should we protest next’, or, ‘what kind of event can we pull off to inconvenience the meritocratic offices’.’

‘You mean, like… terrorism?’ Hamid said, his squeak now entering into dog-ears-only territory.

‘Nah, not like bombs and that,’ Sasha said, waving a hand, ‘just, you know… inconveniences.’

‘No, Sasha,’ Zolf forced through gritted teeth. ‘I _don’t_ know.’

‘You’re from the west country, though, right?’ Sasha asked, either ignorant of Zolf’s stress or pushing on regardless. ‘I bet they didn’t even have talks in your chapter. Just the tea and cake.’

‘I’ll have you know that my parents’ chapter was very efficient!’ Zolf said sharply.

‘Oh?’ Sasha quirked a brow. ‘What did they do, then?’

Hamid also turned to look at him, both eyebrows raised.

Zolf, clearly aware that he’d made a mistake, promptly shut up.

‘I probably shouldn’t have come,’ Hamid said.

‘Too late for that,’ Sasha pointed out.

Hamid had to admit she was right. He also thought that, since he was already there, he might as well finish off his biscuit.

 

*

 

‘It’s come to my attention that you’ve made a new group of acquaintances,’ Wilde said as soon as Hamid had sat down across from the large, perpetually messy desk.

Hamid just gaped at him.

‘I’m sorry?’ he said, eventually, when Wilde did nothing more but stare at him, his hands steepled on the desk between them. ‘I thought this meeting would be about my coursework marks, or my upcoming exams – not my _social groups_.’

‘It’s come to my attention that you’ve joined a new group, as it were,’ Wilde said, picking his words delicately, as though he were stepping barefoot across broken glass.

‘You mean the Harlequin meeting, I imagine?’ Hamid said. ‘And how would you know about that?’

‘You know they’re not the most savoury of characters,’ Wilde said. ‘Your parents paid a lot of money for you to come to this university. Don’t waste it by mixing with the wrong crowd.’

‘Are you blackmailing me?’ Hamid couldn’t believe his ears. ‘It was mainly just a coffee evening! I’m not even joining! I was just going with my boyfriend...’ Hamid said, wincing at the cognitive dissonance of calling Zolf, grumpy prosthetic-wearing nurse in his thirties, something so teenage as his ‘boyfriend’. ‘With my friends. Who you know too!’

Wilde flinched at that.

The spectre of Bertie hung in the air between them.

‘Look, Hamid,’ Wilde said, eventually, running his hands through his hair and looking, unusually for him, more than just artfully dishevelled. ‘I’m warning you – as a friend. Someone reported your going to that Harlequin meeting, and these things get noticed. There are people in this faculty –‘ and there his voice dropped to barely a whisper – ‘people who will care about these things.’

‘So you are blackmailing me?’ Hamid said, confused.

‘No,’ Wilde groaned. ‘Just – focus on your studies, ok? You’re almost done. This is your final year, after all.’

‘I was thinking about staying on for the Masters,’ Hamid began.

‘Please don’t,’ Wilde said quickly.

‘Ok,’ Hamid said, a little taken aback. ‘I… won’t?’

‘Or do,’ Wilde shrugged, his eyes more than a little manic.

‘Ooh kaay?’ Hamid frowned. ‘Are _you_ ok?’

‘Fine! Busy. Thank you for coming in. Good luck with your exams.’

‘Thanks,’ Hamid said, grabbing his coat and bag and hurrying out.

‘Oh, and Hamid?’

Hamid paused by the doorway.

‘Yeah?’

‘Be careful,’ Wilde said, his voice dark and foreboding. Before Hamid could ask anything further, Wilde flicked his wrist and the office door shut in his face.

 

*

 

‘And then he slammed the door on me!’

‘I don’t like Wilde much,’ Sasha offered, the first thing she’d said in the ten minutes that Hamid had been ranting.

‘Join the club,’ Hamid said. ‘Speaking of, I don’t think I go to your meeting again. I don’t know who told on me, but Wilde was insinuating pretty strongly that if my parents find out that I’ll be kicked out of uni.’ Hamid sighed, and stared out at the Cambridge skyline. ‘They might even disinherit me,’ he said sadly.

‘I’m sure they wouldn’t,’ Sasha said thoughtfully. ‘Parents are supposed to love their kids, right? Your parents wouldn’t do that if they love you.’

Hamid, struck with that strange sad feeling common to talking with Sasha, whose conversations were often emotional minefields, just stared out at the sunset behind the buildings.

‘I bet it was Gideon who ratted me out to Wilde,’ Hamid said suddenly, struck with inspiration. Sasha swivelled on her perch to look down at him.

‘You sure?’ she said. ‘I didn’t see anyone like him at the meeting.’

As quickly as the rage had come, it faded. Hamid subsided.

‘Good point,’ he admitted. ‘He would have had to have been following me around, and I would have noticed that.’

‘Oh no, he has been following you around,’ Sasha said. ‘I’ve seen ‘im.’

‘He _what_?’

‘Oh.’ Sasha stared down at Hamid, surprise plain on her face. ‘Really? I thought you knew. He was so obvious. Pretty amateur hour, to tell you the truth.’

‘No,’ Hamid said huffily, drawing his legs up and hugging them close to his chest, ‘I did _not_ know.’

‘I can pay ‘im a visit,’ Sasha said casually. A knife already glinted in her hand, the spring-loaded sheaths so quiet as to be unnoticeable even from only a foot away.

‘No, it’s ok, Sasha,’ Hamid said quickly. ‘I’ll deal with him. Although…’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘I don’t suppose you could help me out?’

‘Course, Hamid,’ Sasha said, genially. ‘What are friends for?’

 

*

 

‘So, Gideon,’ Hamid said, smiling, flanked by Sasha and Azu. ‘You’ve been following me?’

Gideon looked from Sasha to Azu. Hamid heard the slight twang of a spring and saw metal glinting in his periphery as Sasha expertly flipped her favourite adamantine knife. On his other flank, Azu towered over all three of them, her arms crossed, her face in a grimace that, to any who didn’t know her, looked terrifying. It was actually just the result of Azu trying to hold in her normal wide beaming smile, but Gideon didn’t look like he knew that.

Getting Azu in on the ‘intimidate Gideon’ plan had been Sasha’s inspiration. Once they’d impressed upon gentle Azu the need to look fierce, she had performed scarily well.

It was certainly working on Gideon, who was quivering in his chair.

They’d cornered him in the library. Back when they’d been an inseparable trio, Hamid, Gideon, and Liliana constantly commandeered the cosy corner table in the library, though they mainly giggled and gossiped instead of working. Hamid was pleased and unsurprised to find that their habits hadn’t changed at all. He’d timed it so that he knew Liliana would be in labs until the late afternoon, and sure enough, Gideon had been sitting at the best table, pretending to work but actually scrolling through his phone and absentmindedly shooting sparks out of his fingers.

The way his face had gone pale when he’d looked up to see Hamid advancing towards him, flanked by his friends, had been exceptionally satisfying.

‘Look,’ he said, shakily. ‘It wasn’t… I didn’t… I only told Lily, alright? She must have told her supervisor, or someone else in the faculty. I didn’t-‘

‘Why were you following me in the first place?’ Hamid asked.

Gideon’s eyes darted between Sasha and Azu, as though he couldn’t decide which one to be more afraid of.

He didn’t seem to be afraid of Hamid, though he no doubt still thought Hamid was bad at magic, especially offensive magic. It was tempting to let that hot rage in his chest come up through his throat like it desperately wanted to, but Hamid didn’t want to give away too much information.

‘Liliana wanted to make sure you weren’t falling in with… with the wrong crowd,’ Gideon said, swallowing hard. Behind Hamid, the wrong crowd flipped another knife into the air. ‘She – she said that you’d be too impressionable, after the… the trauma.’

‘And she just _cares_ so much about me still, right?’ Hamid scoffed.

Gideon just shrugged. 

‘Yeah,’ he said, and he sounded pretty honest. ‘I thought she did. And I was hoping to find you doing something really bad, so I could make you look bad to her, so she would stop caring. So I told her about the meeting you went to.’

Gideon said it all in a rush, and then flinched and looked surprised.

‘I… didn’t meant to tell you that,’ he said, dawning horror in his voice. ‘I… was that...’

‘Nice one,’ said Sasha, and Hamid turned to see Azu grinning, her necklace – a small replica of the heart of Aphrodite – glowing in the centre of her chest.

‘Thank you,’ she said to Gideon, beaming wider. Gideon shrank back in his chair. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

 

*

 

‘So Gideon just wanted to make you look bad to your ex,’ Zolf said, slowly, as they all caught up over takeaway pizza. 

‘Yeah,’ Hamid said, through a mouthful. He swallowed. ‘So since Liliana wanted Gideon to spy on me, and has told his info to her supervisor-‘

‘Or one of the faculty,’ Azu chipped in.

‘Yes, or that, then it must be because they asked her to keep tabs on me.’ Hamid snorted. ‘It would have been much easier for them to spy on me if Liliana hadn’t broken up with me.’

‘But why would someone in the uni faculty want to keep track of you?’ Sasha asked. ‘That’s not normal university stuff, is it?’

‘Nope,’ Hamid said. ‘I’ll skype Einstein, see if he knows what this is about. He’s one of the good ones, I’m sure of it.’

‘What about… Wilde?’ Zolf asked, though it looked like it caused him pain to do so.

‘I doubt Wilde would be involved,’ Hamid said. ‘He’s not a good person, but he’s been my personal tutor for three years and he’s never not been on my side. But I don’t want him to know about this, just in case.’

Zolf nodded. ‘Keep it out of the faculty entirely.’

‘I don’t want them knowing I know,’ Hamid pointed out. Gideon was a bit of a worrying loose end, but he hoped that the combined intimidation of Sasha and Azu, plus Gideon’s cowardly nature, would keep him in check for the moment.

‘I’ll make sure Gideon sees me around,’ Sasha said, apparently reading Hamid’s mind. ‘Show up in dark corners. Wink at him. Keep him tense. I’m good at that.’

Hamid couldn’t disagree.

 

*

 

After all that, nothing much happened between threatening Gideon and the sudden onset of May exams. Hamid was still very twitchy, and found himself looking over his shoulder all the time, expecting to see suspicious characters following him around Cambridge. But there was never anyone there, Gideon’s burgeoning espionage career put to a halt by Sasha, and Sasha reassured Hamid that she hadn’t see anyone else following him since.

Hamid trusted Sasha, but he didn’t go back to Harlequin meetings, and he was very careful to only perform magic in the university labs. He didn’t know why a lecturer would want to know his movements, and his natural magic was the only thing special about him apart from his rich family, and so it was the only secret special thing too.

He didn’t see as much of Zolf as he would have liked, due partially to his own heavy revision load and Zolf’s long shifts, but he wasn’t exactly starved for companionship. Sasha was like a very quiet, leather-wearing barnacle, having apparently decided Hamid needing protecting, and Azu was always happy to join in.

‘I don’t have many friends in Cambridge,’ she admitted one evening, as they all sat around to watch their current tv obsession, love island. ‘I didn’t have many in Cairo, either.’

‘Well, you’ve got us,’ Hamid said, patting her large hand. Azu beamed and pulled him in to an enthusiastic hug.

Azu’s hugs were an experience.

And then, after exams were over, Grizzop arrived in Cambridge.

Hamid met him at the train station. Azu and Sasha came along, which turned out to be very lucky, as Grizzop’s suitcase was almost taller than him and it turned out that only Azu was capable of actually lifting it.

‘How did you manage at the airport?’ Hamid asked, astounded. Grizzop shrugged.

‘It has wheels,’ he said.

Azu lifted it as though it was full of air, and Grizzop snorted his approval.

‘Grizzop drik acht Amsterdam,’ he said, holding out a spindly hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Azu,’ Azu said, in her deep voice, her hand completely swamping Grizzop’s.

‘Sasha,’ Sasha mumbled from behind Azu. Then, even quieter, ‘who’s askin.’

‘Hamid says you are moving to Cambridge for your Masters’ degree,’ Azu boomed, still shaking Grizzop’s hand firmly. The movement was rippling up Grizzop’s thin hand and shaking his whole body. He looked a little overwhelmed.

‘Er, yes,’ he said, trying to extricate himself. ‘In criminal justice.’

‘Ah,’ Azu said. In the course of her greeting, a small pendant had been shaken free of Grizzop’s shirt. ‘Artemis! That makes a lot of sense.’

‘Aphrodite?’ Grizzop said, no doubt clocking Azu’s own pendant.

Azu always wore her heart of Aphrodite out on her chest, pride of place. It wasn’t unusual for people to broadcast their allegiances to specific gods, though most just trundled along through life believing in all the pantheon rather than fixate on one or two. Azu’s holy replica was a little unusual, though – most wore symbols of their gods, or depictions of them. Grizzop’s own silver pendant of a bow strung with an arrow was more common. Hamid had asked, once, about the heart pendant – Azu had proudly shown off her necklace and explained it as a present from her mentor, Fairhands, when she graduated from medical school.

Hamid had been a little worried – Artemis and Aphrodite weren’t the best of bedfellows – but Azu and Grizzop seemed to hit it off well enough.

Surprisingly, so did Grizzop and Sasha.

If Hamid thought the others would come over less now that he had a flatmate again and wouldn’t just be sitting at home alone all the time, he was very wrong. Grizzop assimilated into their group almost effortlessly. Hamid wasn’t sure what he felt about it.

‘It just all feels so different,’ he complained to Zolf one night, as they lay in Zolf’s bed, on top of the covers, suffering in the heat wave that had struck Cambridge in late June.

‘It’s ok to find change unsettling,’ Zolf said. ‘Sometimes it’s good.’

Hamid thought back to the beginning of the year, when he’d been alone and friendless and abandoned. Alone except for Bertie. Thinking about that hurt a little, because when he thought of Bertie he thought of that still, silent body in a hospital bed, not his vital, larger-than-life, oldest friend.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s good change.’ He thought back to his time in Prague, struggling with the workload and aware that Liliana was slipping away from him, helpless to do anything about it. Drinking away his sorrows every night. Then the year before, living with Liliana, happy but empty, with only two friends he could turn to.

Zolf wrapped his hand around Hamid’s, the only point of contact either of them could stand in the heat.

‘You’ll be ok,’ Zolf said. ‘And we’re all here for you, until you are.’

Hamid squeezed Zolf’s hand.

‘I guess it is nice to not be the smallest in the group anymore,’ he admitted with a small grin.

Zolf just laughed.

 

*

 

Once their schedules were much lighter after term and exams were over, Hamid was able to organise a skype meeting with Einstein. Even then, Einstein only had about twenty minutes to spare.

‘Very busy over here, you know how it is!’ he squawked into the camera. The scenery behind Einstein’s head – the parts not hidden by his voluminous hair – was moving; Hamid wondered if Einstein was skyping on his phone as he walked. 

‘Um, yes, Professor, I was wondering if you might know anything about why certain… lecturers would be spying on me?’

‘Spying?’ Einstein sounded out of breath – Hamid surmised he was definitely on the move.

‘Yes, spying. Or, rather, getting their students to spy on me.’

‘You think it’s because of the sorcerer thing?’ There were the sounds of traffic in the background; Einstein was all but yelling into the mic.

‘Yes, professor. That – thing I’m keeping quiet about,’ Hamid ground out through gritted teeth.

‘Oh, probably,’ Einstein said. ‘One of the teachers here was very interested in your… abilities, I should say.’

‘Who?’

‘Ah, you know,’ Einstein said, waving a hand. ‘Tall, skinny, wears a lot of black!’

Hamid racked his brains.

‘Kafka?’ he hazarded.

‘Yes! That’s the one.’

 

*

 

Hamid checked the online system at mid-July and got his results. 

It had maybe been a mistake to do it at the lunch table in the hospital canteen with everyone else staring at him. 

‘So?’ Azu asked excitedly. ‘How did you do?’

‘I haven’t looked yet,’ Hamid said, waiting for the page to load. 

‘Shitty hospital wifi,’ Zolf said. He took Hamid’s free hand even as it shook and sweated in his lap. 

‘You won’t have failed,’ Grizzop said matter-of-factly. ‘You said yourself it went much better than any of your other exams.’

Hamid opened his mouth to argue that point, and the page loaded.

His mouth stayed open.

‘Oh my god,’ he said weakly.

‘What? What did you get?’ Azu asked.

Zolf leant across and plucked the phone from Hamid’s limp, unresisting hands.

‘He got a 2:1,’ Zolf said.

A cheer went up at the table, cutting across the general hubbub of the canteen, and several curious heads turned their way.

‘I passed,’ Hamid said, still in a state of shock, not sure whether he wanted to cry or throw up. ‘I passed.’

‘You did _well_ ,’ Zolf said, grabbing his head and planting a big smacking kiss on his lips. ‘I knew you would.’

Azu got up from her chair and rounded the table to drag Hamid into a bone-crushing hug. Sasha reached over and patted his shoulder awkwardly; Azu dragged her into the hug too.

‘Hey! With a 2:1, you could stay on for the master’s course,’ Grizzop said, helping himself to Azu’s forgotten chips.

Hamid’s smile dropped.

It was Sasha who found him later, in what Hamid considered ‘their’ space – perched on top of the student union building.

‘Hey,’ she said, settling down beside him. 

‘Hey.’

Hamid turned to look at her profile, cast into sharp relief by golden rays of the setting summer sun.

‘What are your future plans, Sasha?’ he asked. 

‘Don’t really have them,’ she grunted, flicking out a knife.

‘None? Not even a… a hope, or a dream?’

Sasha flipped the knife once, twice. 

‘I guess I just see myself doing the same thing I’m doing now,’ she said.

‘An antiques dealer?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That. And, I don’t know, I always thought it would be nice to…’

‘Yeah?’

‘To have a little school, or something. Teach others.’

The knife went up, went down.

‘Teach others how to deal antiques?’

Sasha shot Hamid a sideways smile. Hamid grinned back.

‘Antiques. Sure,’ she said.

 

*

 

‘I’m going to go on the master’s,’ Hamid said to Wilde as soon as he walked into his office.

‘Oh?’ Wilde looked up from his computer, eyebrows raised. ‘You do know you can opt out, right?’

‘I want to,’ Hamid insisted.

‘Well. Ok, then,’ Wilde said.

Hamid waited by the door, but Wilde just went back to his work.

‘Ok?’ Hamid said.

Wilde looked up again.

‘Yes?’

‘Is that it?’

Wilde shrugged. ‘What else do you want me to say?’

‘I don’t know?’ Hamid said. ‘What happened to the ‘be careful’, or ‘someone’s out to get you’ from last time?’

‘No one’s out to get you,’ Wilde said. ‘At least, not you specifically. But you should still be careful, Hamid.’

‘Why?’ Hamid sat down in the chair facing Wilde’s desk and leant forward urgently. ‘What should I be careful of?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you,’ Wilde said. ‘But – maybe don’t take any units in electromagicmagnetism, ok?’ He smiled thinly before going back to his typing.

Hamid sat there, nonplussed.

‘Ok?’ he said.

Wilde ignored him.

‘So it’s Tesla?’ Grizzop said, later, when Hamid related his discussion with Wilde.

‘It must be,’ Hamid shrugged. ‘It makes sense. He’s Liliana’s supervisor _and_ he’s the main lecturer for EMM.’

‘But I thought Einstein said it was Kafka?’ Zolf said, frowning.

‘Yeah, that’s where I’m confused,’ Sasha said. ‘And why would either of them want to know what you’re doing?’

Zolf and Hamid shared a look.

‘They might suspect my… heritage,’ Hamid said.

Understanding dawned on Sasha’s face; Azu and Grizzop looked lost.

‘Sorcerers are supposed to be very rare,’ Sasha agreed.

‘You’re a sorcerer?’ Azu and Grizzop said in unison.

Hamid winced.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but we’re supposed to keep it on the down-low!’

‘Sorry Hamid,’ Sasha said, not looking at all repentant. 

‘So what are you going to do?’ Azu asked.

‘I’m going to do the masters,’ Hamid said, his voice surer than he felt. ‘I just wish there was a way I could find out what Tesla was up to.’

‘And how he’s linked to Kafka,’ Zolf agreed.

‘I can break into his office,’ Sasha said, ‘have a look around.’

Hamid recovered first.

‘You… can?’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Sasha said, shrugging, ‘no problem. I’d probably need you to come along in case of magical traps, but I’m pretty good at picking locks.’ She reached into one of her pockets and pulled out a set of tools – well-used and well-cared for.

‘I should come,’ Grizzop said. ‘If Tesla’s using students to do his grunt work, I can only imagine what laws he’s breaking.’ He looked unaccountably excited by the prospect.

‘I should come too,’ Azu said, looking worried. ‘I don’t like the thought of you three going alone.’

Everyone turned to look at Zolf.

‘Of course I’m coming,’ he said, ‘but I cannot believe how quickly you’ve all decided on breaking the law.’

‘Only to stop worse law-breaking,’ Grizzop pointed out.

‘Are we seriously thinking about this?’ Hamid squeaked.

All of them nodded.

‘Well, then,’ Hamid said. ‘I guess this is happening?’

 

*

 

They broke in on a Sunday evening.

‘Not even the most hardcore researchers are in the lab at midnight on a Sunday,’ Hamid had said.

Sasha had picked a student’s pocket earlier in the week so they could get through the main doors. Hamid, who had just been going to use his own, realised just how unprepared he was for their breaking and entering.

‘It’ll be on the system if you use your own student card,’ Grizzop pointed out, making Hamid feel like an idiot.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t have all come along,’ Hamid said, as they all stood in the corridor waiting for Sasha to pick the lock to the labs. 

The mechanism clicked loudly.

‘Ok,’ Sasha said, as the door swung open, ‘Tesla’s office is at the back of the labs, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Hamid whispered, following her inside. The labs looked so different, empty and dark. What was normal in the day looked strangely sinister in the gloom and quiet of the night.

There was a crash from behind them; Hamid whipped around to see Azu standing next to a smashed beaker, looking incredibly apologetic.

‘Careful,’ Hamid mouthed to the group, and they tip-toed on.

Tesla’s door was just a normal door, the small glass window papered over from the inside as most lecturers were wont to do, so that students couldn’t peer inside and see that they were not, as their email signature would have them believe, out of office.

Sasha moved towards it with her tools – and paused.

‘Can you… you know,’ she said, wiggling her hand towards the lock, ‘check to see if there are any magical trip wires?’

Hamid, who had already struggled with the spell to keep them hidden from the security cameras, swallowed down his panic and had a go.

‘I can’t feel any,’ he said, really forcing his magic out. Some spells – most not even proper spells – came naturally to him. Some, like the current one, was like twisting his magic into a shape it did not want to go. It was like wrestling a cat into a bath. ‘That doesn’t mean we’re in the clear.’

Sasha shrugged, and got onto the lock.

It popped open almost instantly, and they all peered into the dark office.

‘His drawers are probably locked,’ Sasha said, already across the room and rummaging around in Tesla’s desk.

There were papers spread across it. Hamid bent closer to look, one of his hands handily lighting with a warm orange flame. The light danced over Liliana’s handwriting, and the enormity of what he was doing struck him all at once.

‘Guys,’ he said, ‘we really shouldn’t be here…’

‘Ah-ha!’ Sasha crowed. ‘Here.’

She must have pressed a button, or flicked a switch, because from underneath them came the clank of a mechanism falling into place.

A panel in the wall slid open, and huge metal shape strode jerkily out. Where a mouth would have been on a normal person, a hatch slid open. There was light flickering inside it.

‘Oh shit,’ Hamid said. ‘Everyone out!’

There was a mad scramble as everyone tried to get out of the small office and into the lab outside. Warm hands grabbed Hamid and threw him bodily to the side. He fell heavily to the floor, sliding to a stop just beneath a desk.

The resulting blast from the metal figure rendered Hamid deaf for a few seconds. When he regained his faculties, he saw the figure climb out of the wreckage of the office doorway.

Zolf was halfway across the lab, lying against a desk. A dark puddle was pooling from beneath his leg.

‘Zolf!’ Hamid screamed.

The metal man turned to face him.

In quick succession, it was hit from three sides. Sasha, appearing from nowhere, flipped smoothly over its shoulder and stabbed one of her daggers into the middle of its forehead. Ice spread out from the dagger, crystallising over the metal head. Grizzop, having taken cover behind a desk, pulled a bow seemingly from the air and fired two shots in quick succession, the silvery arrows sinking deep into the figure’s chest. Azu, standing behind it, slammed down hard on its cranium with a glowing pink Great Axe.

Hamid really, really loved his friends.

The figure staggered in place, but quickly regained its balance. It flung out an arm and caught Sasha mid-flip; she went flying across the room and hit the desk Grizzop was hiding behind. Azu got another good hit in before she, too, was batted away – she hit the wall and went down hard. 

Hamid screamed, and fire streamed from his mouth. The metal man advanced through the fire, reaching out one glowing metal hand. It closed around Hamid’s throat and the fire petered out as he choked and gasped. In his panic, his hands were turning scaly, his fingers turning to claws only to scrabble helplessly against the metal of his captor.

Another arrow flew past but glanced off the figure’s arm.

‘Careful!’ Azu yelled.

‘I can’t get a clear shot,’ Grizzop squeaked back.

Hamid struggled in the unforgiving metal grip. He could see everyone from his vantage point of being held aloft by the figure. They were far away enough. They would be ok.

Zolf had dragged himself upright – sitting propped against the desk he’d been thrown to, his eyes met Hamid’s. Realisation dawned in Zolf’s face.

‘Hamid, don’t you _dare_!’ He screamed.

Hamid closed his eyes and pointed his hands straight down, and his world erupted into fire.

 

*

 

To his very great surprise, Hamid woke up.

The ambient humming and beeping sounds, plus the tug of an IV in his hand, told him he was in the hospital. He cracked open an eye that felt gummed together with a week’s worth of sleep, and saw an empty hospital room. 

He braced himself for pain to hit, but it never came. Lifting his arms, he was surprised to see his skin was smooth and unblemished where he’d been expecting burns.

As he lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to get over the shock of not being dead, a machine next to him began to trill.

A few seconds later and the door swung open. 

‘It’s nice to see you awake, Mr al-Tahan,’ said a nurse he didn’t recognise. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hamid croaked.

‘Hmm,’ said the nurse, checking his charts and waving a hand over his body. Warm golden sparks rained down from her fingertips and settled gently on his body like snow.

‘Between one and ten, how’s your pain?’ she asked. 

‘Umm, two?’ Hamid wasn’t really sure what he was feeling. His brain was ready for pain, but his body felt heavy and numb, strangely beyond his reach.

‘Great! We can take down your dose a little, then – we had to give you quite a lot before your system responded!’

‘I – my friends…’ Hamid rasped, struggling to sit up. Memories slammed into him like several freight trains, one by one; the breaking and entering, the metal figure, the fight…

‘You’ve had a few visitors, but you’ve been asleep for almost seventy-two hours,’ the nurse explained. ‘I need to take the stasis spells off, but you have an urgent visitor first, so I’ll dial down your painkillers and you’ll feel a little more aware.’

‘Thank you,’ Hamid said.

The door opened once more, and Wilde walked in.

‘Wilde?’ Hamid didn’t think he could take much more surprise.

‘Thank you – you can wait outside. I won’t be long,’ Wilde said to the nurse, not unkindly. She nodded and smiled at Hamid before walking out and gently pulling the door shut behind her.

‘Wilde?’ Hamid said, again. Thinking felt like trying to see through thick fog – everything felt colourless and indistinct.

‘Well,’ Wilde said, pulling up the only chair and slumping down into it with his usual laissez-faire attitude. ‘You certainly how to keep me busy, Hamid.’

‘I… sorry?’

‘I imagine you’re confused about not being handcuffed to your bed right now,’ Wilde said pointedly.

‘To be honest, I’m more confused about the not being dead part.’

‘Yes, well – that was a foolish thing you did. I was getting it all under control discreetly, and then you went and exposed Tesla in the most explosive way possible.’

‘Umm… sorry?’ Hamid offered again. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say.

Wilde just sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

‘Well done, Hamid. The official story is that you and your friends, while working late in the lab one night, accidentally discovered Tesla’s illegal experimentation into anti-meritocrat weaponry.’

‘We did?’

‘You did.’ Wilde dragged himself upright.

‘The others are fine – a bit shaken, but in one piece. And you’re the heroes.’

‘Oh,’ Hamid breathed.

‘If you could inform me the next time you want to do something so dramatic, it would be much appreciated.’

Wilde’s sanctimonious smugness, which had until that point in the conversation been unusually absent, made its full return.

Hamid rolled his eyes.

‘Who _are_ you?’ he asked.

Wilde just smiled enigmatically – a very punchable smile, Hamid noted – and got up to leave.

‘Get well soon,’ he said, pausing at the doorway. ‘You have a master’s course to start in a couple of months. Now I believe you have some people waiting to see you.’

He slipped out the door and Hamid had a few moments of confused peace before the nurse came bustling back in.

‘Right then, Mr al-Tahan,’ she said, cheerily. ‘Let’s get those stasis spells off.’

An hour or so later, after some very embarrassing adventures with bodily functions – stasis spells were all well and good at the time, but didn’t half have a sting in the tail – Hamid was settled back into his bed and pumped up with painkillers just as the pain began to rear its ugly head.

‘I’ll let them know you’re ready,’ the nurse said.

She left, and Hamid, feeling the drugs start to get into his system, suddenly his eyelids were very heavy.

‘Just shut my eyes,’ he slurred to thin air, ‘just for a second.’

When he woke again, he was no longer alone; there was a warm hand wrapped around his own, the one without the IV, and Zolf was in a chair beside his bed, his own head tipped back, snoring gently at the ceiling.

‘Zolf,’ Hamid said, hearing his voice crack embarrassingly.

Zolf woke with a snort.

‘Hamid!’

Zolf leant across as far as he could from his chair and kissed him fiercely – Hamid was very glad the nurse had given him a toothbrush to clean his teeth.

‘Don’t _ever_ do that again,’ Zolf said, taking Hamid’s head between his hands and giving it a gentle shake. ‘Promise me.’

Hamid knew he would do exactly the same thing again if he had to, but nodded anyway.

‘How – what happened?’ he asked. ‘Wilde told me the – the _official_ story, but what happened after I-‘

‘After you immolated yourself and the simulacrum?’ Zolf shrugged. ‘It was on it’s last legs after that. It dropped you and Grizzop got a few good shots in. Azu caved it’s skull in and that’s all she wrote, really.’

‘And after?’

‘You were… unresponsive. Your skin – you were completely covered in scales. That’s what kept you alive, I think, what kept the worst of the fire at bay. I managed to stabilise you and heal some of the damage. You were almost back to normal by the time the emergency services got there, though – your secret’s still safe.’

‘Are the others ok? Are you ok?’ Hamid scanned down Zolf’s body. He looked untouched, apart from some healing pink patches of skin on his arms. Then Hamid realised that the chair Wilde had sat in was on the other side of his bed – and Zolf was in a wheelchair.

‘Your leg!’ Hamid squeaked. ‘Are you-‘

‘Ah, it’s nothing. Broken but mending,’ Zolf said, slapping the cast that had been just below Hamid’s line of sight. ‘Means I’m currently without any working legs, but it won’t be forever.’

‘A break?’ Hamid wasn’t up on his medical knowledge, but he’d broken enough bones as a young boy climbing to places he shouldn’t back on his family estate to know that a straightforward break should be easily fixed by magic.

‘I may have – aggravated it a bit,’ Zolf said, shrugging, trying hard for nonchalance.

‘And these?’ Hamid ran a finger down the healing burns on Zolf’s forearms.

‘Turns out fire resistant scales retain a bit of heat after they get blasted with a fireball,’ Zolf said, aiming for a chuckle but ending on more of a croak. ‘I thought… I thought you were dead.’

Hamid had a sudden horrible flash of a vision – Zolf, dragging himself across the burning lab with his broken leg, just to cradle Hamid’s unresponsive body.

‘You’re an idiot,’ Hamid said.

‘Pot, kettle,’ Zolf said.

‘And the others?’

‘Mostly just cuts and bruises. Sasha had a minor concussion. All easily fixed. They got discharged after a couple of hours.’

Hamid sank back into his pillows in relief.

‘And no one got into trouble?’

‘No,’ Zolf said, looking a little put out about it.

‘Isn’t that a good thing?’

‘Yes.’ Zolf huffed. ‘Wilde said he sorted it, and I guess he did.’

‘Yeah – I wonder who he is,’ Hamid mused. ‘He’s clearly not just an English literature professor.’

‘Probably works for the meritocrats,’ Zolf sniffed. 

‘Well, whatever he is, he helped us out.’

‘He’ll be such a smug bastard about it, too,’ Zolf grumbled. Then he caught Hamid’s eye, and they chuckled.

A gentle knock on the door broke the moment, and the nurse poked her head in, apologetic.

‘I’m sorry, Mr al-Tahan, but your sister is on the phone.’

‘Oh, no,’ Hamid groaned.

 

*

 

‘Will they even allow you back to Harlequin meetings?’ Hamid asked

To celebrate Hamid’s discharge from hospital the others had helped Grizzop tidy the flat and throw a small surprise party. They’d ordered all Hamid’s favourite takeaway, from pizza to sushi to Chinese, and Azu had made a banner. It was a big white sheet, tied on one side to the curtain rail, and to a door hinge on the other, giving it a somewhat lopsided look. WELCOME HOME HAMID was scrawled across in pink glittery letters. There was already glitter shedding onto the floor below.

Hamid really loved his friends.

‘Why not?’ Sasha asked, as she dangled a pizza slice over her open mouth.

‘Local heroes stop anti-meritocrat terrorist,’ Hamid said, gesturing grandly. ‘Isn’t that against the Harlequin manifesto?’

‘Tesla was a rogue cannon,’ Zolf shrugged, delicately selecting some sushi from the tray and sprinkling on soy sauce. ‘Those kinds of lunatic hurt the cause.’

‘Did Wilde say why Tesla wanted you followed? Or the link to Kafka?’ Grizzop asked.

Hamid shook his head.

‘I guess someone noticed I was not a usual magic user in Prague, and it somehow got to Tesla through Kafka,’ Hamid said. ‘Maybe he thought I was working with the meritocrats and that I was using Liliana to spy on _him_. Maybe he thought he could use me to test the simulacrum. Who knows?’

‘I bet Wilde knows,’ Zolf grumbled.

‘Well, Tesla’s in prison now,’ Azu said magnanimously. ‘He can’t do anything now.’

‘We all make a pretty good team,’ Sasha said, uncharacteristically sociable. ‘To foiling evil plans,’ she said, holding out her plastic cup of champagne – Hamid had a couple of fancy bottles in his fridge for special occasions, but hadn’t trusted any of them with his crystal glassware and hardwood floors.

‘To foiling evil plans,’ Hamid iterated, and they all clinked their plastic cups together. Grizzop had to lean so far forward that he almost fell face-first into the vegetable pizza. His frantic flailing knocked one of Zolf’s crutches to the floor, and on its way down it caught two water cups and brought them down too.

There was a frantic flurry for tea towels by the most able-bodied; Azu almost sent Grizzop flying in her panic and Sasha only just flipped out of the danger zone. Hamid just watched the chaos with a smile.

Zolf caught his eye and they grinned together. Zolf’s hand squeezed his.

‘Welcome home,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Hamid said, looking around at his friends. ‘Home.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't kill Bertie. I couldn't do it. So he's in a coma, and dreaming of some non-specific hell dimension, and will potentially wake up one day. 
> 
> And Sasha and Grizzop are fine and happy and they're all one big found family. Take that, Alex.
> 
> I kind of want to write more in this AU just to get all three Ben characters into one room, talking to each other.


End file.
